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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (457)
Yes. There is far too much idiocy in the world to spend time and effort on trying to make it look presentable.
OTOH the result of doing that is sometimes just plain awesome.
This link is dead (possibly because the blog has been hidden then re-opened in the interval). Could you please update it?
Done.
That's not steelmanning, that's having fun and having fun is awesome :-)
I think an argument has to have some value going for it in the first place to make it presentable by steelmanning and the idea is to preserve the gist of what someone was trying to communicate. Batshit crazy just won't compute no matter how much you patch it with duct tape, and making a whole new argument from scratch (like reading the Bible or Mein Kampf metaphorically) doesn't count as steelmanning, I think.
Definitions, definitions...
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Steelmanning is an attempt to see if there is some rational core that can be salvaged from a bad argument by making all conditions and assumptions for it as favorable as possible -- in a way you can't decide whether an argument is worth steelmanning until you have steelmanned it.
But I guess it's possible just to have two thresholds: one (low) for even trying to steelman, and one (higher) for checking whether the steelmanned version makes any sense.
... by manipulating conditions and assumptions? No. Just like strawmanning, it's actually going in and changing the content of the argument.
By manipulating conditions and assumptions that are not explicitly stated?